July 8, 2014
Emeritus Professor Bruce Francis has won the 2015 IEEE Control Systems Award, the highest honour in the field of control bestowed by the IEEE.
Established in 1980 by the IEEE Board of Directors, this award recognizes an individual’s “outstanding contributions to control systems engineering, science, or technology” and considers the seminal nature, depth, and breadth of contributions, as well as singular achievement and practical impact.
Francis receives the award for “pioneering contributions to H-infinity, linear-multivariable, and digital control.”
H-infinity is a mathematical approach to the design of controllers, signal processors, and feedback amplifiers. The term H-infinity is named after the mathematician G. H. Hardy and refers to the maximum magnitude of a frequency-response function.
His first book on the topic, about 150 pages, “put my name out there,” said Francis. “It made a big impact because it was the first accessible treatment of this subject.”
Francis’s 1975 PhD thesis, “The Internal Model Principle,” was on linear-multivariable control. His work on digital control is best captured in his 1995 book Optimal Sampled-Data Control Systems.
Francis is one of just three Canadians to receive the Control Systems Award: George Zames of McGill University won it in 1985, followed by ECE Emeritus Professor W. Murray Wonham in 1987. Francis earned his PhD under Wonham; Zames was external examiner at his defence.
In addition to Wonham and Zames, Francis joins three more of his heroes, Keith Glover, Stephen Morse and Mathukumalli Vidyasagar, on the recipients list.
“I’m amazed—very surprised and happy that I got it,” said Francis. “This is my big year.”
In January the IEEE Control Systems Society named Francis winner of the Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize for 2014. He will deliver a plenary lecture at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) in December 2014 in Los Angeles on the subject of distributed robotics.
The Control Systems Award consists of a bronze medal, certificate and honorarium. It will be presented at the 2015 CDC in Osaka, Japan.
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca